Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday August 25, 2013 @09:44PM
from the wish-I'd-known-this-15-years-ago dept.

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Ryan Vogt writes in the Mercury News that Shakespeare described death as 'the undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn no traveller returns.' Did you know there is a the miraculous way to resuscitate tabs sent to the 'undiscovere'd country,' a sort of Ctrl-Z for the entire Internet, that means 'no more called-out cusswords, no more wishing the back button had you covered when, aiming to click on a tab, you accidentally hit the little X on the tab's starboard.' For Macs: Command [plus] shift [plus] t reopens the last tab. For PCs: Ctrl [plus] Shift [plus] T. 'Try it right now. Close this tab and bring it back. I dare ya.' Melia Robinson's trick [described for Chrome] works in Firefox and Internet Explorer, too, so clumsy mousing won't send the the E*Trade tab you mistakenly closed all cued up to sell those 10,000 shares of stock or your long political post on your uncle's Facebook page on a one-way trip to the undiscovere'd country in those browsers, either." No guarantees on the stock trading.

This got greenlit? Really?
Maybe I should post an article about a wunnerful shortcut that almost always lets you restart your computer without power cycling. Hold these 3 keys down at the same time: control - alt - delete. I call it the 3 finger salute. Maybe I should patent the idea and trademark the name and retire?

Because undo is used in other contexts too, and it may confuse certain users who wouldn't think to click outside of a text box before hitting ctrl-z for example.

I'm not sure why this is on Slashdot though. I'd expect people here usually actually look at the options on menus. I usually just right click a tab and choose "reopen closed tab" rather than use the keyboard shortcut.

Ctrl-Z is already used if you're typing into an input field. Say you're typing an email, then you close background tabs for whatever reason. Then you realize you accidentally moved a paragraph. Should you have to reload those tabs to undo the operation?

You could validly say yes to that based on user expectation, even though reloading tabs is expensive (hits the network and CPU and everything). But then what if you switch tabs? Now your undo stack corresponds to a different tab's actions (try it! Try t

Well, it's both very badly written and seems to exist for the sole purpose of informing about a browser feature that is already very well-known and can be accessed via the always intuitive context menu, which will also provide the shortcut information. So I'm going to go with B, even though I feel a fellow/.ter will prove me wrong by linking to an even more stupid story.

The keyboard shortcut is spelt out in full right there in the "Recently Closed Tabs" submenu, inside the History menu you're looking at, and you needed some random blogger getting a front page article on Slashdot to find it for you?

You must be new here. (I'm only saying this try to get some of the 4 digits to show up)

I was thinking the same thing to tell the truth...usually I dismiss those "There are no real nerds on Slashdot, it's not the same, it's turned into reddit" guys... but on this non-story... I sort of agree.

There should be a way to punish people for stupid posts so that they cannot post anymore. Whoever is behind this story however deserves a title to have come up with the stupidest, most ridiculous/. story ever that has been accepted and published.

Maybe it's the alcohol... But I really have no idea what the summary is talking about.

They're talking about Firefox, but astonishingly, don't mention that in the summary. At least, I tried it with Firefox and it works. Maybe it works in other browsers, too, but I'm too lazy to experiment. It is a useful shortcut that I didn't know about.

I think they are talking about using a fucking up 3 finger keyboard shortcut to do what any Gecko or Chromium based browser does with a right click. Why on earth you'd want to go through a 3 finger keyboard shortcut when its just right click>reopen closed tab and unlike the 3 finger bullshit you can undo as many levels as you want, all the way back to when you opened the browser.

I'll probably get hate for saying this but "keyboard commanders" seem to think its some great accomplishment when they trip o

I think they are talking about using a fucking up 3 finger keyboard shortcut to do what any Gecko or Chromium based browser does with a right click. Why on earth you'd want to go through a 3 finger keyboard shortcut when its just right click>reopen closed tab and unlike the 3 finger bullshit you can undo as many levels as you want, all the way back to when you opened the browser.

I'll probably get hate for saying this but "keyboard commanders" seem to think its some great accomplishment when they trip over some funky fucked up keyboard shortcut and when they point it out a good 90% of the time I have to reply with "Uhhh...you know there is a button that will do that, right? See just click here, no need to twist your fingers into pretzels when there is a GUI button right there" but then they get all pissy, like we should all be amazed at the fact they can twist their fingers into pretzels to do what the rest of us can do with a single click of the mouse in the right place.;

I can press a 3 finger key sequence a lot faster and easier than moving the mouse to the narrow tab bar at the top of the browser window, right clicking, scrolling to the right menu entry (in Chrome, if you right click on a tab, it's the 6th entry on the list, if you right click on an empty space on the tab bar, it's the 2nd), and then clicking it.

Do you actually find it easier to use the mouse to do this? But then, usually when I inadvertently close a tab, it's because I hit Ctrl-W, so my hands are already on the keyboard.

It's where some half-assed tech journalist wannabe discovers the History -> Reopen Last Closed Window shortcut (and the Chrome equivalent) and wants to blare it from the rooftops like we've cured cancer or something.

handy shortcut to know, especially when you accidentally close 2 tabs when you meant to close just the one. most of us are self taught and we tend not to go much beyond what we need to know. Probably why we tend to get pissed off with ribbons and the like as it throws out what we already knew.

Being taught is also a problem as usually there are a few methods available to do something and just one is usually taught which may not be the most convenient -the ECDL courses seem to be taught that way.

Wait till they discover Ctrl-Shift-N, and gain the power to recover whole windows!

Also, minus 10,000 points to the original author and those who quoted him without (sic) for writing "undiscovere'd." Seriously, what the fuck do you think that apostrophe is doing? Get rid of that last E!

Seriously? This functionality has existed as long as tabs have existed.

And even if the magic keystrokes are forgotten, they're just a Google away.

That said: There really should be an easily-identifiable way in Firefox to restore a closed tab without using a keyboard. Perhaps an entry next to "New Tab" under the now-hidden-by-default file menu would suffice.

That said: There really should be an easily-identifiable way in Firefox to restore a closed tab without using a keyboard. Perhaps an entry next to "New Tab" under the now-hidden-by-default file menu would suffice.

There is - in fact I never use the keyboard shortcut: History menu, Recently Closed Tabs, choose the one you want back from the submenu. Of course you actually have to make the menu bar visible to find it, but doesn't everyone do that anyway?

You discovered a keyboard shortcut in your browser that may or may not work on any other browser in existence and has been in use by yours truly since the invention of tabs? Woohoo, you rock, now go help your mom connect to that YouTube video you posted...

Do this: Click the "Reply to This" link below the post. Then type something, then close the tab. Now restore the tab. Note that the text you typed is gone (at least on Chromium and Firefox, can't bring myself to care about other browsers off the clock). The TFA acts as if this will save you some headache, and perhaps it does if the form fields were not dynamically generated via DOM manipulation... Otherwise you lose your shit. Especially if you use Dvorak, where the Ctrl+V is dangerously close to Ctr

If you close a tab that you didn't mean to close, just hit Command-z and the tab will reopen. It was the last thing you did, so it makes sense that Command-z would undo that. This isn't exactly rocket science.

OK, I can see this becoming a filler article on some crappy "tech" website (coughcoughgizmodocough). But Slashdot? Seriously?

And it's not even written for our audience. I could see a "top ten keyboard shortcuts users don't know (but should)" or a "comparison of undo buttons between every program" (I can never remember the Emacs one... it's ctrl-x u, right?). But a "dude, check out this awesome keyboard shortcut I just found" for something I've been using at least daily for years?

OK, I can see this becoming a filler article on some crappy "tech" website (coughcoughgizmodocough). But Slashdot? Seriously?

And it's not even written for our audience.

To be fair, I recently asked someone about what forum someone could point me to where slashdotters could freely talk about encryption. We can only talk about something for about 2 days here, and then container story gets buried no matter how important the topic. When the Journal system debutted here it sort of provided that, but besides technolust there was very little eyeball traffic.Your post made me realize that what/. is missing is a forums.slashdot.org. Imagine a PHP-like board where we can post freely and start our own new topics or questions without needing to mind how long ago something was added. Stuff like reddit comes to mind, but it's too mainstream and joke-ish. Others have stringent rules where everything must be on topic (stackexchange et all) and moderation is too in your face, causing competition (down to editing, moving and closing other people's threads) / there's no real community, unless you count meta.

I cannot count the number of times that I have been filling out a form on a web page and hit the backspace to edit only to discover that I had lost focus on the form and had the tab slammed shut and all information on the form lost. This is a problem on EVERY version on EVERY browser that I have ever used. Unfortunately this little shortcut does not fix that issue. I don't find backspace to be a useful navigation tool. I want to be able to turn it off or at least have a way to recover the information.

I cannot count the number of times that I have been filling out a form on a web page and hit the backspace to edit only to discover that I had lost focus on the form and had the tab slammed shut and all information on the form lost.

To solve that problem, you need the Lazarus Form Recovery addonhttp://getlazarus.com/download

I didn't know about this! I've been the IT career for most of my career life!

I tried it today and it blew my mind! I first went around showing all my co-workers this. They were super amazed and thought I was extra smart!
They told my manager how incredibly smart I am and I gained +1 to salary! Thank you Slashdot!

Now all the cute blondes at work worship me to! Knowing this has made me more attractive and successful, and gets me laid!

Please post more articles like this, a few more and I will be the CEO of a major corporation by being the super office hero guy.

I've been using this daily for so long I don't remember when it was added to Firefox.

But, who are you and what did you do to slashdot, the news for nerds site. You know, people who know how to use Google. People who don't look a piece of software and think the main menu is all there is to it. People who *gasp* might think about looking up keyboard shortcuts to a program they use every day just because.

And most importantly: Are we going to run individual articles for one keyboard shortcut from now on? Seriously, at least do what every other online magazine does when it doesn't have a good story for the day and lump 10 or so of them together into an article.